Mom at war used to doing the dirty jobs

Those of you who’ve read our story “A Mother’s War“ already know that Saralee Trimble is a woman of immense faith. But it is both faith and a strong constitution that give her the strength to carry on in San Antonio, supporting a badly wounded son far from home and family.

A lifetime of dirty work has made her tough.

Before coming to Fort Sam Houston last fall, Saralee ran a Jani King cleaning franchise while living in New Orleans. Her family probably wouldn’t have resettled there if not for the economic downturn, which drove them out of the small town in Canada they’d called home for years.

Saralee’s husband, Dan, came to New Orleans from Florenceville, New Brunswick. Out of a job, he arrived in town after Hurricane Katrina to do some charity work and eventually landed full-time employment. They had been in Canada since 1997 and had made a home there. And Saralee, indeed, had a great job, working as a researcher for McCain Foods, a $1 billion manufacturer known for producing the French fries sold by McDonalds.

“I worked in the research and development lab and they were working on the low-fat fries,” she said. “What they were working on is putting a certain type of cornstarch coating on the potato, the actual fry, so that as the water boiled off the oil could not come in, and so it made a lower-fat fry.

“They could shave off maybe 30 percent of the calories that way.”

It was a much better job than the one before that, where she washed heavy-duty trucks 10 hours a day, four days a week.

But of course, you wouldn’t hear Saralee Trimble complain.

“That was very hard work. These car washes they used for the big trucks, they feel like they are going to knock you down, and I couldn’t drive the trucks so I had to always go into the shop and ask the guys to move them for me. And they didn’t like that a whole lot because I was pretty good, I was always interrupting them. About every 45 minutes they’d have to pull that truck and trailer out, and pull the next truck and trailer in,” she said. “We used Tide to wash the trucks and then we used an acid on the trailers.”

If this was work that others wouldn’t want to do, so be it. There is no sense that the truck-cleaning business was beneath her or that she hated it.

You probably never forget a dirty job. They may have been the ones that kept people going back to college after the end of every summer.

If you wonder why Saralee Trimble found something good in those jobs, it goes back to lessons learned in childhood. And those experiences also explain why she’d had no second thoughts about uprooting her life and that of her family to be with her son, Pfc. Kevin Trimble, a triple amputee.

“I’ve worked on a farm. Both sides of my family are farmers,” said Saralee, who spent long hours tending livestock from the time she was 14. “My dad’s side of the family are dairy farmers and my mother’s side of the family are farmers also in various degrees. My grandfather was a county agent in Alabama, and he had a farm.

“We always enjoyed the farm, and when you grow up around animals you don’t mind being dirty. It’s just part of life,” she said. “I think when you have a sense of responsibility, it’s a part of you.”